


your place in the family of things

by Vorpal_Sword



Series: the soft animal of your body [8]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Anxiety Attacks, Episode: s05e09 The Rundown Job, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Love Confessions, Multi, OT3, Pandemics, Team as Family, there's not actually a pandemic, they're just afraid of one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:55:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23541175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vorpal_Sword/pseuds/Vorpal_Sword
Summary: The team's gone up against some seriously dangerous people, but with a bioterrorist threatening to release the Spanish flu, Hardison is painfully aware that the stakes have never been higher. Luckily, he has the toughest hitter and the greatest thief in the world on his team. He's about to learn that they might be a little more than a team.Or, the Rundown Job, with daemons.
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Series: the soft animal of your body [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1483046
Comments: 54
Kudos: 237





	your place in the family of things

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it's still me— This was actually the username I wanted to use in the first place, but AO3 was fussy that day and I just never got around to changing it until now. I hope y'all are staying safe and healthy out there.  
> Content Warning- Hardison gets a little stuck in an anxiety thought spiral about pandemics, among other things. The majority of it is focused on the "comfort" part of "hurt/comfort," though. 
> 
> The title, like the series name, comes from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:  
> You do not have to be good.  
> You do not have to walk on your knees  
> for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.  
> You only have to let the soft animal of your body  
> love what it loves.  
> Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.  
> Meanwhile the world goes on.  
> Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain  
> are moving across the landscapes,  
> over the prairies and the deep trees,  
> the mountains and the rivers.  
> Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,  
> are heading home again.  
> Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,  
> the world offers itself to your imagination,  
> calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -  
> over and over announcing your place  
> in the family of things.

It starts with the Spanish Flu. 

Okay, well, no, if Alec is really being honest with himself, it started way before that. Maybe it started after Moreau, when Parker and Eliot tied him up and taught Leia how to get him free, when they all began actively teaching each other their respective specialities. Maybe it started with the Iceman Job, when Eliot claimed he wouldn’t bail Alec out if he got in trouble and showed up to rescue him anyway.

Or maybe it started way back in the corridor of Pierson Aeronautics, watching Eliot take down four security guys before Alec’s bag could hit the floor, the swift grace with which he’d emptied the gun and tossed it away, the satisfaction with which he’d declared, “That’s what I do.” _Do me next_ , Alec had thought, and squelched the thought so hard he spent the next few years convinced that he liked watching Eliot fight because he liked seeing bad guys get their just desserts and not because Eliot in motion, Eliot in his element, was as impossibly hot as Parker cartwheeling through a laser grid.

It’s sorta like opening a safe. The tumblers have been clicking into place one by one for a while, but it isn’t until they save the world together that the metaphorical safe swings open and Alec understands what this has been leading to. 

It happens like this:

Alec has never regretted the rapid-fire way his brain does calculations, almost involuntarily, until he starts doing the math on what it would look like if the Spanish flu gets out. He can see it spread out in his mind, the disease jumping from person to person, exponential growth, incredibly high rate of transmission. There are half a million people in D.C., give or take, with thousands of people traveling from all over the country— all over the world— on a daily basis. It would be a matter of days before it got to New York City, and a week after that there'd be outbreaks in every major city around the world, all before anyone knew to start quarantining...

“A hundred fifty million people dead,” he answers Parker. Leia trembles against his neck. “We’re thieves, man, and we’re damn good at what we do, but this is way, way, out of our league. And you expect us to catch some psycho with a city killer? A country killer?” _A world killer,_ he wants to add, but it sticks in his throat, the image of mass graves floating in front of him. 

“You scared?” Eliot asks.

“You’re damn right,” Alec says. Leia whimpers in his ear. He glances around at the street, at all the strangers passing by. Everything magnifies and he is suddenly aware of all the casual touching they are doing, how close they are to each other. A businessman coughs into his hand and grabs a shopping cart. A hot dog vendor hands over lunch to person after person. A couple kisses on the corner. So much touching. He can’t breathe. He’s just a hacker, not a superhero. This is not the kind of virus he knows how to handle. He can’t breathe. He feels jittery, feverish. Feverish! What if they are too late and he already has it? If he has it, Parker and Eliot have it too, he’s killed them, he—

His spiraling thoughts are interrupted by an odd surge of confidence, an unwavering strength that grounds him like an anchor, an electric warmth against his side, holding him up. He looks down. It takes a moment to process what he’s seeing. If it weren’t for the alien emotions sweeping over him, he never would have believed what his eyes are reporting— that Boudicca has pressed herself against him, that _Eliot’s soul_ is touching him, her solid muscle supporting his shaking legs, her fur softer than he’d imagined.

(When had he ever imagined how her fur might feel?) 

She nuzzles at his arm. It feels like sunshine, like a mountain, like it warms him to the bones, like it might burn him with sheer intensity if he stays too long, like it will never abandon him, not ever. 

He looks at Eliot, at that dear familiar face, speechless. Eliot steps into his space, not even sparing a glance towards his daemon, though Alec can’t imagine the amount of sensation the hitter must be getting through the bond. “I’m not scared. I got the best thief and the smartest guy I know chasing this guy,” Eliot says, and Alec would dismiss it as bravado if he couldn’t feel Eliot’s rock-solid faith washing over him. 

_A hundred million graves_ , Leia thinks to him. He flinches. _You can’t outthink a virus, not before it’s already killed._ Eliot reaches around to cup the back of his head, only just avoiding touching the raccoon clinging to his shoulder. “Hey, listen to me,” he says. 

Alec looked into those storm-blue eyes. Somehow, Eliot’s touch feels like even more of an anchor than that of his daemon. Eliot says, “You're the smartest man I’ve ever known, Hardison. I need that brain to get me to him. ‘Cause you know if I lay my hands on him, it’s done. Get me to him.” 

Alec takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then another. _Just get Eliot to the terrorist. We can do that._ His brain clicks into gear, running a new program, analyzing, remembering, putting pieces together. 

Eliot nods, releasing Alec’s head. He and Boudicca step back together, in sync, Eliot reaching a hand to bury in her ruff without looking. Leia looks, though, and Alec realizes she is wondering what that strong hand would feel like in her own fur.

“He has to weaponize it,” Alec hears himself say. 

“Good. That’s a start,” Eliot says, and they are off.

Afterwards, Alec and Parker take Eliot home to patch him up. They exchange a long glance, in perfect agreement that they won’t let the hitter slink off to one of his various sketchy medical professionals. 

“Play up your feelings,” the dragonfly whispers into Alec’s ear, hovering just above his shoulder. 

Parker’s plan works perfectly, of course. Eliot won’t admit to needing any help with his own injuries, but Alec just has to drop a couple unsubtle hints about not wanting to be alone after the unbelievable stress of the day for Eliot to volunteer to accompany him back. It even has the benefit of all being true. 

Alec knows better than to betray concern over Eliot’s health in mixed company, to do anything to damage Eliot’s tough-guy reputation in front of the government suits, when that rep helps keep Eliot alive and safe, but, well. _Eliot_ might take getting shot lightly but Alec doesn’t. He hustles the bleeding hitter to the couch, muttering under his breath about being surrounded by self-sacrificing idiots with no sense to take care of themselves while he goes to get supplies.

(It occurs to him as he fusses over Eliot that Parker might have been manipulating him, too, redirecting all his nervous energy and leftover adrenalin into something he can actually control. Parker’s plans often work on multiple levels. For a moment, he considers being irritated at being managed so neatly but, well, _Parker_ is looking out for his _emotional wellbeing_ , and how can he be upset about something as wondrous as that?)

It isn’t until he gets back to the couch with a stack of ice packs, bandages, and a glass of Eliot’s fancy fresh-squeezed orange juice that he realizes Leia has gone uncharacteristically silent, glancing back and forth rapidly from Parker to Eliot and back to Parker again, like they might disappear if she doesn’t keep her eyes on them.

He sets the glass down carefully and dumps the rest of the things into a pile on the coffee table, within reach of Eliot’s uninjured arm. Leia leaps off his shoulder to perch on the coffee table, where she has a better vantage point for watching both Eliot on the couch and Parker in the kitchen without swiveling her neck.

“You’re not allowed to get shot anymore,” he informs Eliot, who has the audacity to laugh at him. 

“I generally try to avoid it, it’s not my favorite activity,” Eliot answers, way too flippantly for someone with two fresh bullet holes in him. 

“Eliot,” Alec says, trying and failing to keep his voice even, “you ran directly at a guy who was actively _shooting at you_.” 

Eliot shrugs, then winces. “Well, he was a really bad guy,” he says, like that makes it okay. “And if I hadn’t, he would have shot at you, so.” He shrugs again, more cautiously this time so as not to jostle the bandages.

Leia actually _hisses._

“That ain't exactly reassuring!” Alec retorts, mildly alarmed at how shrill his own voice sounds.

Eliot sighs, reaching for one of the ice packs and positioning it carefully against his shoulder. “Dammit, Hardison,” he says with fond irritation. “You gotta know that if it’s a choice between you getting shot and me getting shot, I’ll pick me every time.”

Leia makes another distressed noise and Alec follows her gaze to where Parker is nodding in emphatic agreement.

The thing is. Well, Alec _does_ know that Eliot would take all kinds of punishment to keep him safe. There is an upsettingly large set of data points from the last four years to prove it. His brain oh-so-helpfully provides a flashback reel of Eliot getting punched in the gut, Eliot getting whacked in the head, Eliot getting shot, Eliot bruised, Eliot bleeding. He tells himself firmly to stop thinking about that, the way Jess says to, but instead of stopping, it is replaced with a reel of Parker jumping off buildings, Parker crawling through extremely tight vents, Parker running through a subway tunnel holding a dirty bomb.

He stares at the bandages on Eliot’s body and sees vividly how close it could’ve been, each bullet only inches away from hitting something vital. He sees himself desperately trying to staunch the flow as Eliot bleeds out on the subway floor, knowing the effort is futile, knowing that all three of them are only seconds away from becoming Patients Zero in a deadly, world-altering pandemic.

Distantly, he is aware that his body has begun to tremble, that he is gasping for breath, that Leia is squeaking wordlessly, but all he can think of is Boudicca fading in a golden shimmer and Parker feverish and coughing. 

“Hey. Alec.” There’s a voice next to his ear, accompanied by a cold nose that sends an incongruous jolt of electric warmth through him. “Alec. We’re here. We’re all alive.” 

Alec opens his eyes to find himself on the floor between the coffee table and the couch and Boudicca’s face just inches from his. She rubs her muzzle against his cheek. 

Alec, still in an anxiety-induced haze, raises a hand to scratch under her chin. It is something like what he’d imagined a Vulcan mind meld to be like, the _intimacy,_ the glimpse into Eliot’s deepest self, and something like when Nana had signed the adoption papers, swearing to keep Alec forever and ever, and something like being pulled out of a grave into Eliot’s embrace. But really it is like none of those things at all, because touching Eliot’s daemon is so totally unlike anything Alec has ever experienced. 

Then Eliot moans, and Alec snatches his hand back like it has been burned. "I'm sorry!” he yelps.

“I’m not,” Boudicca says at the same time Eliot rasps, “ _Yo_ _u_ got nothing to apologize for.” 

Leia clambers over Alec from her perch on the coffee table to touch noses with the wolfdog, whacking Alec in the face with her bushy tail on the way. 

Alec watches his daemon fuss over Boudicca for a minute, then glances up at Eliot, whose gaze is fixed on the two daemons. If he hadn’t just had his hands on Eliot’s soul, Alec would have attributed the pain in the hitter’s eyes to his recent injuries.

“We gonna talk about this?” he asks gently, indicating the daemons with a tilt of his head.

Eliot flushes. “Your girlfriend is _right there_ , man,” he hisses. 

Both men look over to where Parker sits on the kitchen table, fidgeting with a padlock and eating cookies. She doesn’t look up in response to their eyes, though there is no knowing where the dragonfly is looking. Alec, with a surge of adoration, realizes that she is humming the Firefly theme song. 

He supposes he can see where Eliot is coming from— touching another person’s daemon is more intimate than sex, the greatest taboo, not something one would do with anyone other than their partner and certainly not with someone else while their partner is in the room. Alec knows of couples married for decades who would never touch each other’s souls. But still— “I don’t got secrets from Parker,” Alec insists. “And we can’t ignore this, El, c’mon.” 

“Boudicca was just trying to help you through a panic attack, it don't mean anything,” Eliot claims.

“Yes it does,” Alec and Boudicca say together, and Leia says, “It means you love us.”

Alec waits for Eliot to deny it, but the hitter just swallows hard. “I’m sorry,” he says, glancing again towards Parker. “You’ve got a good thing going here, I didn’t mean—I’ll go. I can recommend a couple trustworthy hitters to Nate, please just let me gather my things.”

“You’ll do _what_?!” Parker yelps, before Alec even has a chance to do more than gape. She jumps off the table with a clatter and glares at Eliot. “You can’t abandon us!”

Eliot avoids her gaze in favor of tightening bandages and stacking up ice packs. “It’ll be better for you if I get out of your way. I never wanted to impose anything on you, you don’t owe me nothing. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t’ve pushed.” He sounds ashamed, the way he does when he refers to things he did for Moreau. Alec thinks he would set the world on fire if it kept Eliot from ever sounding like that again.

Leia says, ever so softly, “Love ain’t a thing you gotta apologize for, Eliot.” 

The hitter stands up shakily, careful not to put too much weight on his injured leg. “Sometimes it is,” he says. 

Parker’s eyes fill with tears, and the dragonfly bobs up and down in the air by her ear. “Do something,” she hisses at Alec, but he has no idea how to fix this.

“Eliot,” Boudicca says. He looks over at his daemon, standing next to Alec with Leia curled around her front paws. 

“I hope you’re happy,” he tells her. Alec shudders at the bitterness in his voice. “We coulda had something here if you hadn’t pushed.” 

“Eliot,” Boudicca says again. “If you won’t stay and protect them, I will.” 

Alec holds his breath as the wolfdog and her human exchange a long, weighted look. He and Leia argue sometimes, but he cannot imagine disagreeing so strongly that she threatened to leave him, if that had been an option available to them. 

“So much for never again,” Eliot says.

Boudicca snorts, scathingly. "Never again except as necessary to protect the team or a child," she retorts, tossing her head. "If you think for _one minute_ they’ll be safer or happier or better off without us, you’re crazy.”

“Yeah, that!” Parker agrees, glaring at Eliot, who glances around at each of them and, Alec can’t help but noticing, at all the possible escape routes. Finally, he slumps and collapses back onto the couch. Boudicca, satisfied, sits back on her haunches.

Parker rushes forward and begins dropping the ice packs back onto his bandages and poking at his bruises. “You belong with us,” she tells him. “You’re not allowed to leave.” She hesitates. “Well, we’re not jailing you, you can leave if you want, but only if _you_ really want, not if you think you know what’s better for us. Because you’re what’s better for us.” 

“But Parker—” Eliot says helplessly. “Your boyfriend…”

Parker snorts. “We don’t get what the big deal is,” she says, sitting on the arm of the couch and swinging her feet onto Eliot’s lap, keeping him in place. “You’ve been cuddling for months.” 

“I never—” Eliot says at the same time as Alec says “we’re not—” 

Parker gives them a deeply unimpressed look, then deliberately transfers her gaze to the spot on the carpet where Boudicca and Leia like to sprawl whenever the trio watches movies together. Where, in fact, the raccoon is now curled at the wolfdog’s feet. 

“Oh,” Alec says. From Parker’s perspective, without distinction between human and daemon, he and Eliot _have_ been pretty wrapped up in each other for ages now. In which case— “Parker, you broke a beer bottle with your bare hands when you saw me flirting with someone else. And that was _before_ we were actually together. How are you so okay with this?”

Eliot says, “Wait, you did _what_?” He sounds rather impressed. 

“We did do that, didn’t we,” Parker muses. “Oops.” She shrugs with both bodies, the dragonfly’s wings glinting in the light. “We were scared you’d like someone else and abandon us, but Eliot isn’t someone else, he’s _Eliot_. You having feelings for Eliot won’t take you away from us.”

“I don’t have feelings for Eliot,” Alec protests reflexively. Eliot flinches, and Leia turns away from fussing over Boudicca to bite his finger sharply. 

“Hardison,” Parker says, looking at him like she can’t believe how slow he is being. “You bought him a brewpub.”

And. Well. Okay, that was a fair point. He did do that. 

“Wait, you did what?” Eliot demands. 

This time, it is Eliot who is the beneficiary of Parker’s _we- can’t- believe- you’re- not- getting- this_ look. “Did you really think he bought a brewpub because of high staff turnover and easy money laundering? And _accidentally_ showed you a lousy menu so you’d want to take it over? He did it because cooking is your, y’know, your thing.” She wiggles her fingers significantly on the word _thing_. “Just like it’s not an accident that the ceilings are so high, so we can rappel. He wanted you to be able to do your thing. It’s how Hardison shows he cares.”

Eliot turns to stare at Alec, who can feel himself blushing under the melanin, and then back again at Parker. “It’s okay you didn’t realize,” she says reassuringly. “We knew it was for you all along, of course, but we didn’t realize what it meant until you taught us about tasting feelings in food. It turns out there are feelings in everything!” She beams at them. 

"And that don't...bother you?" Eliot asks dubiously. 

Parker blinks at him. "You taught us about tasting feelings in food," she repeats, like he's missing something obvious. Eliot's eyes widen and he flushes again, glancing nerviously towards Alec. 

"I— we— you know—" Eliot stutters. Parker reaches over to twine her hand into the hitter's hair and tugs him up towards her. Alec knows Eliot can resist far more pain than a little hair-tugging, but he follows her without protest until she kisses him firmly on the mouth. For a moment, Eliot's eyes flicker closed and he leans into the touch. Then he pulls back and looks guiltily at Alec.

Even after everything that has passed between them this evening, Eliot clearly still expects Alec to leap to his feet in defense of his lady's honor, as though Parker belongs to him and not to herself, as though it were not abundantly clear that Parker had taken the initiative. At the moment, though, Alec is too busy processing _the hottest damn thing he has ever seen_ to explain any of that to Eliot and settles for smiling adoringly at him instead, hoping he'll get some of right idea.

"Kissing you feels like your cookies taste," Parker declares. She turns to grin at Alec and adds, "Triangles are the sturdiest shape, you know." 

Alec doesn’t quite know what to do with that. Leia's always been faster than him, though. The raccoon clambers onto the couch to join Parker’s feet on Eliot’s lap, _touching_ both of them at once, and fireworks go off in Alec’s brain. He can feel Eliot recoil and it _hurts,_ it _hurts,_ but Parker tangles her fingers in Leia's ruff the same way her other hand is tangled in Eliot's hair. It feels like jumping off a building and _flying_ , soaring, sunshine and wind at their back, and then Eliot’s registering wonder instead of fear, and nothing’s ever felt as safe as Eliot’s strong hands in his daemon’s fur. 

Somewhere deep in his soul, there is still a child clutching a battered suitcase who doesn’t expect to ever be kept, who depends on imitating the people around him to fit in, who still believes that no one who catches a glimpse of the real person under the masks will want to stick around, but now that child looks up in wonder. Every touch is a vow. _We know you. We love you. We want you. We belong together._

“You’re crying,” the dragonfly says.

Normally Alec would try to make a joke and play it off, but it’s impossible to hide the depth of his emotions with their hands on his daemon, and he finds he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t need to. Neither of them are likely to cry from sheer intensity of emotion but he knows now that his doing so won’t change their opinion of him.

Boudicca leans over and licks the tears off Alec’s cheek, just as Also Parker lands on his shoulder. The depth and instensity increases exponentially, a trio of mirrors reflecting each other, an infinity of different angles of joy and love and _belonging_. 

Alec has no idea how much time has passed when Boudicca moves away, but he can’t keep the disappointed whimper from escaping his lips. A moment later, Eliot releases an entirely different kind of whimper. Alec’s eyes fly open to see Parker scratching Boudicca’s ears.

From the dragonfly against his skin, Alec feels a twinge of Parker's old grief as she looks at the wolfdog, followed by her deep boundless joy at this strange new idea of _family,_ and Lord Almighty how he loves this woman. 

There’s a twinge of impatience from Leia, who has gone boneless with pleasure and can’t formulate a clear thought. Alec understands, though, and scoots forward to trail his fingers through the fur of Boudicca’s back. 

Eliot _moans_. 

This time, the sound goes straight to Alec’s gut. 

(Or well, not exactly his gut. And, for that matter, _straight_ probably isn’t the right word for it, either). 

Parker laughs, her _pants-feelings-are-kinda-ridiculous-but-boy-am-I-having them_ chortle. It had taken Alec a while to figure out that she wasn’t laughing _at him_ , with his own insecurities and baggage, but now the sound sends a shiver down his spine.

“No running away,” Parker says. “No disappearing. If there’s a problem, we deal with it.”

The vow darts around the circle so fast Alec has no idea who thought it first, or if such distinctions matter anymore, as closely as they are knitted right now. It’s just one word:

_Together._

They grin at each other shakily. “Hey, we saved the world today,” Alec says. He sounds even giddier than when he got a new laser. “Wanna celebrate?”

The dragonfly brushes the sensitive spot at Alec’s clavicle and he shudders with the pleasure of it. Eliot says, “You bought me a _brewpub!”_

Laughter fills the room: Boudicca's low chuckle, Leia's chittering giggle, both parts of Parker sounding like bells.

Alec knows there will be other bad guys, even other terrorists, people they won’t be able to stop. He knows there may be other diseases. Even with all the data at his fingertips, the world is uncertain and dangerous and frightening. He’s an anxious person, okay, and that’s not going to go away just because he got a couple partners, no matter how amazing they are.

He’s terrified of Eliot coming up against a hitter he can’t beat. He’s petrified of Parker’s ropes snapping twenty stories up. He’s scared of things he can’t predict, can’t control, things like a pandemic or a car accident or a tornado, anything that will keep his loved ones from coming home to him.

But Alec is no longer afraid that they won’t _want_ to come home to him, and right now, that’s enough. That’s everything. 

He wipes away his tears, scoops up his daemon from the couch, and follows his— his people to the bedroom.   
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I'm writing this after weeks of sheltering in place with no end in sight. I feel very blessed to be with my chosen family in this difficult time, but it is still So Damn Much. Sending hugs to all (at a nice safe internet-distance).


End file.
